The Adkissones' marriage disintegrated eight years ago after Adkisson had been drinking heavily and then put a gun to Alexander's head, said Carol Smallwood of Alice, Texas.

According to Anderson County Court records, as their marriage went awry, Jim David Adkisson said he had an option.

That choice was to blow his wife's brains out and then do the same to himself, an order of protection in Anderson County Chancery Court shows.

Alexander filed for the order of protection against him on March 1, 2000, records show.

The legal action was taken in response to an incident that occurred Feb. 22 of that year, according to the petition for the order. Two days later she filed for divorce.

If you own guns and you're acting like this, please give someone your guns and go get help. If you know someone who owns guns, and you're seeing things like this, do something about it.

I deeply believe in people's right to have guns. But responsibilities come with those rights - and when you show that you can't deal with those responsibilities - as this guy obviously did - you cannot claim the rights. This guy should have been disarmed. One strike, and you're out.

I'll have more to say later, but today it is all about those who have lost loved ones or been wounded. If you make issue comments in this thread, I'll delete them.

« ok, I'm done now

Bridgekeeper: Stop. Who would cross the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see.

Sir Lancelot: Ask me the questions, bridgekeeper. I am not afraid.

Bridgekeeper: What... is your name?

Sir Lancelot: My name is Sir Lancelot of Camelot.

Bridgekeeper: What... is your quest?

Sir Lancelot: To seek the Holy Grail.

Bridgekeeper: What... is your favourite colour?

Sir Lancelot: Blue.

Bridgekeeper: Go on. Off you go.

Sir Lancelot: Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.

That's how I imagine things went for Obama's piece. For McCain's - not so much...

Sir Robin: That's easy.

Bridgekeeper: Stop. Who would cross the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see.

Sir Robin: Ask me the questions, bridgekeeper. I'm not afraid.

Bridgekeeper: What... is your name?

Sir Robin: Sir Robin of Camelot.

Bridgekeeper: What... is your quest?

Sir Robin: To seek the Holy Grail.

Bridgekeeper: What... is the capital of Assyria?

[pause]

Sir Robin: I don't know that.

[he is thrown over the edge into the volcano]

The email rejecting McCain's piece is here, and actually - it really does read like this joke. Here's the email:

It would also have to lay out a clear plan for achieving victory ... with troops levels, timetables and measures for compelling the Iraqis to cooperate. And it would need to describe the Senator’s Afghanistan strategy, spelling out how it meshes with his Iraq plan.

As well as the command roster down to the platoon level, vehicle counts, and ammo loads for each vehicle. No notes - this will be a closed-book test.

It's the Times' credibility that gets slammed here a bit, I think...

« ok, I'm done now

Here's the core point (I think) in his blog post:

First, Kirchick, Hemingway, and AL don't really seem to understand Yglesias' argument; it's not that patriotism is "bad"; it's that the patriot can't really talk to the non-patriot in a way that's going to persuade the non-patriot to his point of view (to use an example, the American flag-waver won't convince the Chinese flag-waver to drop his flag and start waving the stars and stripes). This has to do with the nature of patriotism, not with the nature of patriotism's object. If patriotism is a sentiment of solidarity, enthusiasm, and affection, then the analogy to sports fandom is apt. But it's misreading Yglesias to think that he's accordingly equating a country with a sports' team. He's not.

Look, if all nationalities are fundamentally the same, then de gustibus is the only basis on which we talk about them, and I can certainly make the claim that, having never seen the sun set over the Adriatic, I cannot appreciate Croatia the way that I appreciate California.

And certainly when we talk about places - about Croatia, California, or Calabria - we're talking about an admixture of things - culture, language, lifestyle, geography, etc. And each of those is a part of the centrality of place which can be extended to the particularity of nation.

And when we do so, we're talking about nationalism - my nation vs. your nation. And it is certainly possible and appropriate for people to feel patriotism to their nation - let's go back to Schaar's useful definition:

At its core, patriotism means love of one's homeplace, and of the familiar things and scenes associated with the homeplace. In this sense, patriotism is one of the basic human sentiments. If not a natural tendency in the species, it is at least a proclivity produced by realities basic to human life, for territoriality, along with family, has always been a primary associative bond. We become devoted to the people, places and ways that nurture us, and what is familiar and nurturing seems also natural and right. This is the root of patriotism. Furthermore, we are a all subject to the immense power of habit, and patriotism has habit in its service. Even if we leave the homeplace for a larger world, finding delight in its variety and novelty, we delight as much in returning to familiar things. The theme-of-homecoming is the central motif of patriotic discourse, as old and as deep as the return of Odysseus from Troy, and the feeling is always the same:

When we saw the top of the mountain from Albuquerque we wondered if it was our mountain, and we felt like talking to the ground, we loved it so and some of the old men and women cried with joy when they reached their homes. (2.)

The other side of the case is the melancholy figure of the lone wanderer, or of the Stoic whose "my home is everywhere" meant he had a home nowhere.

To be a patriot is to have a patrimony; or, perhaps more accurately, the patriot is one who is grateful for a legacy and recognizes that the legacy makes him a debtor. There is a whole way of being in the world, captured best by the word reverence, which defines life by its debts;: one is what one owes, what one acknowledges as a rightful debt: or obligation. The patriot moves within that mentality. The gift of land, people, language, gods memories, and customs, which is the patrimony of the patriot, defines what he or she is. Patrimony is mixed with person; the two are barely separable. The very tone and rhythm of a life, the shapes of perception, the texture of its homes and fears come from membership in a territorially rooted group.

The conscious patriot is one who feels deeply indebted for these gifts, grateful to the people and places through which they come, and determined to defend the legacy against enemies and pass it unspoiled to those who will come after.

(emphasis added)

Now, it's equally possible for a pole to be obligated to her patrimony as it for an American or for a Canadian or for a Nigerian.

And if that was all that we were talking about then yes, Yglesias would be right and yes, it would be impossible to explain American patriotism to a Nigerian except as the American case of what the Nigerian feels about his own people and homeland.

But...

...the patrimony we have as Americans is not just a place, a culture, and economy or the artifacts of our history. It is not the gravestones of our fathers and mothers.

We have inherited a system - a system of beliefs and a system of government that was revolutionary at the time - although firmly embedded in the philosophy of the moment, and firmly tied to previous historical examples (Athens, Rome, Switzerland, the Netherlands). Now it is arguable that every nation similarly inherits 'a system'. But I think there is an argument to make that most of these systems are more alike than different, and that the American 'system' is unique, is different enough to have been in a category by itself when it was derived.

People may differ on that, and I think it's a useful razor for dividing those who believe - as I do - in American exceptionalism from those who do not.

Because if you don't you can certainly see it in the context of wider enlightenment theories and make the claim that it was a part of an undifferentiated Enlightenment push for human rights throughout Europe.

And yet, if you believe that, how is it that the creaky system set up by the founders has lasted so much longer than any national political arrangement in Europe? How is it that the nature of American politics is so different?

I'll suggest that that nature is so different because our national identity is not embodied in a person - in the Queen of England - nor in a culture, as defined by L'Académie française - but in a set of ideas and documents? Why does an incoming president or a new Army recruit swear their allegiance to the Constitution, not the Queen, the French people. Watch the video of Sarkozy's inauguration (warning, boring and in French). There's no timecode in it, but fairly early on in the speech given to Sarkozy: "...for the duration of your term, you incarnate France, symbolize the Republic, and represent the whole of the French people..." Sarkozy's loyalty is thus to a nation, the ideal of a Republic, and to the French people. Nowhere is there any such loyalty to the French constitution (the 5th one) or the concepts of the French polity - except the airy ones of "libertie, egalitie, fraternitie".

It is both the content of our Constitution and out attachment to it and the Declaration of Independence as embodying America that matter so much. Because if you took a handful of Americans and moved them to the moon, those documents would still have power - as I believe they have power beyond our national borders.

And there's where we get ourselves in trouble. Because as much as those documents have power to people who are not American, we are still a nation, with all the issues that brings. And so we get ourselves caught between the universality of the values in our core beliefs and the specificity of membership in the polity that lives by them.

A lot of things get trapped in the fold, and I hope to write more about them in a bit.

Chris also posted a smart comment on the American history of these ideas...(although it reminded me a lot of a hysterical speech from 'Good Will Hunting').

I actually haven't read Hartz, and hope to grab a copy from the library or bookstore tonight. I'm familiar enough with the other works however, to make a preliminary stab at a counterargument.

On point (1), the problem with Hartz's view is that , as one critic put it, it was "Locke et praetera nihil" (Locke and nothing else). But with the publication of the Origins and the Creation (and, to a lesser extent, Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment), the doctrine became (same critic) "omnia praeter Lockem" (everything except Locke). Not to get into it in too detailed a fashion (I'm a lawyer, not an historian), the bottom line is that Hartz's easy thesis of liberalism at the creation proceeding uninterrupted gave way to a more complex view in which liberalism really was one idea, or set of ideas, in a mix of any others, and thus the American polity would constently be negotiating the terms of its order.

If that's true, then the idea of "Exceptionalism" whithers away; our polity is no longer one that began fully-formed as accepting the classical liberal tradition, but was a policy that, from the outset and continuously, was debating different ideas of just government and the relationship between government and man.

Well, I think that it's pretty much the accepted view among the historians I've studied with (Schaar, Page Smith) that while Locke was probably the largest intellectual star that the Founders sailed by, he was by no means the only one. And that your construction of "...the American polity would constently be negotiating the terms of its order." is wholly appropriate - the Founders were themselves not of a unitary mind on many issues, and the documents we revere today were the consequence of much naked horsetrading, violent argument, and subtle negotiation - they were, and are, essentially political documents, not ideological ones.

Which I do not believe in any way vitiates either the revolutionary nature of the political project they spring from and embodied, nor the exceptional quality of that project. Why did it need to be wholly Lockean, or even wholly sprung from Enlightenment sources to be novel? It is certainly the case that the Founders were deeply familiar with, and argued deeply about Roman republicanism as well as Athenian democracy in constructing their scaffolding. How does that make their work any less a product of the Enlightenment?

And if not a product of the Enlightenment, how does it make their project any less unique?

« ok, I'm done now

Note that the firmly anti-gun National Parks Conservation Association has set up a form where you can send a comment directly to the regulators. You may want to edit their default message just a bit, however - mine was edited to read:

"America's national parks are some of the most peaceful places in our country. While they offer solitude and an opportunity for reflection, they also present risks from natural and human predators. That's why I am so pleased to learn that the administration is considering allowing loaded guns in our national parks.

Our park rangers cannot keep up with the activity already happening in our parks, and opening up the parks to allow guns even where hunting is not allowed will allow responsible, armed citizens to defend themselves and their loved ones when the Park Service cannot be available to defend them from threatening wildlife and criminals.

Please do open up our parks to loaded guns. This administration would be setting a truly decent and honorable precedent by allowing loaded weapons in our parks, and respecting the trustworthiness and basic rights of the millions of law-abiding respectful American citizens.

Sincerely,

Marc Danziger"

There's also the opportunity to send a message to your friends about the importance of this - I sent a message to Kim DuToit and Glenn Reynolds. I'm sure you can think of a few friends who would like to participate!

If you'd prefer to submit your comments directly (you never know if NCPA vets comments before sending them on) you can do so directly on the US Department of the Interior website.

« ok, I'm done now

American movies have forgotten how to portray heroism, while a large part of their disappearing audience still wants to see celluloid heroes. I mean real heroes, unqualified heroes, not those who have dominated American cinema over the past 30 years and who can be classified as one of three types: the whistle-blower hero, the victim hero, and the cartoon or superhero. The heroes of most of last year’s flopperoos belonged to one of the first two types, although, according to Scott, the only one that made any money, “The Kingdom,” starred “a team of superheroes” on the loose in Saudi Arabia.

The confusion he experiences arises later in the piece, and seems to have two causes. First, he wants to say that Hollywood has changed recently, but finds roots for all the problems he cites going back through the 1930s, and especially in the postwar. This problem is easy to dispose of: it used to be that Hollywood could explore both genuine heroism and these other models; but now, it rarely attempts genuine heroism.

The second problem is larger, and odd given his profession. He misunderstands at least two critical examples: one that he uses at length, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and one he fails to cite where it is most necessary, Open Range.

Open Range is something I cited in a piece on this topic in 2005.

In some respects, Open Range is almost a reversal of High Noon: the entire town comes out with rifles, unasked, to defend strangers they really aren't sure about; and in the end, the ability of one of those strangers to do violence for justice is enough to win him a place in their hearts. Where Gary Cooper left in disgust, Kevin Costner found a home and the respect of a people.

In the context of Bowman's piece, Open Range is even more important. Boss Spearman, played by Robert Duvall, is exactly a hero of the type he says that Hollywood doesn't do anymore:

But it is “3:10 to Yuma” that offers the most interesting contrast between the old-fashioned sort of Western and the new breed. It was a remake of a movie first made in 1957, directed by Delmer Daves and starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin. Like so many other Westerns of the period, it was a parable of the heroism of the ordinary people who brought civilization, peace, and prosperity to the Wild West. Heflin’s character, Dan Evans, is a simple farmer in danger of losing his farm to drought who, for the $200 it would take to pay the mortgage, accepts the task of escorting Ford’s Ben Wade, a dangerous killer, to catch the eponymous train to trial. At a moment when it looks as if he is sure to die in the attempt, Evans explains to his wife that he is no longer escorting the prisoner for the money but as a civic duty. “The town drunk gave his life because he thought people should be able to live in peace and decency together,” he said. “Can I do less?” Needless to say, there is no comparable line in the remake.

There is in Open Range. While Kevin Costner's character, Charlie Waite, qualifies as a 'victim hero' of the type Bowman describes, Boss Spearman is a genuine hero. He is a decent, honest, hardworking man. He tries to help others who need it, including the boy they have taken in from starvation to train as a cowboy until they can find him other work. People respond to his example, like the troubled Waite, who has followed him for ten years just because he sees in Spearman's example a way to overcome his past and live a decent life in spite of his dark impulses. He is finally roused to full battle over the same principle Evans cites: a fury at a rancher who will not allow people to live in peace and decency. After a murderous attack on his small band, who were only passing through, he comes to town to settle up.

We got a warrant sworn for attempted murder for them that tried to kill the boy who's laying over there at the doc's. Swore out another one for them that murdered the big fellow you had in your cell. Only ours ain't writ by no tin star bought and paid for, Marshal.... Baxter's men bushwhacked our friend and shot him dead. Shot a 15-year-old boy, too. And clubbed him so hard, he might not live. Tried to take our cattle. Your marshal here ain't gonna do nothing about it.... A man's got a right to protect his property and his life.

As noted above, what is so inspiring about the movie is how -- once someone finally stands up to the tyrant rancher -- the townsfolk increasingly start to side with the embattled cattlemen, finally coming out in full. It is the reverse of High Noon in another thing too: at the end of the movie, the town embraces them. The two cattlemen enter into a partnership to run the saloon in town, and Waite -- finally relieved of so much of his fear and loneliness -- falls in love with and marries the sister of the town's doctor.

Bowman is not wrong to say that such movies are rare. Nevertheless, the abscence of Open Range is a critical failing in a piece devoted to this topic.

Meanwhile, his concept of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is simply wrong.

The subtext of films featuring the whistle-blower hero, the cartoon hero, and the victim hero is that heroism—heroism of the, say, Gary Cooper type—belongs to the public and communal sphere, now universally supposed to be cruel and corrupt, and therefore is really no longer possible or even, perhaps, desirable.

That seems to have been the point of the great John Ford film of 1962 called “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” In it, John Wayne plays rancher Tom Doniphon in the Wild West town of Shinbone, which is still part of a territory not admitted to statehood and has only a comically feckless Andy Devine resembling anything like a duly constituted authority. Shinbone is terrorized by an outlaw named Liberty Valance, played by the great Lee Marvin. An idealistic lawyer named Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) comes to town to practice his profession only to find that there is no law there. In fact, he himself is robbed by Liberty on his way into town, yet he can find no one there who thinks that this is any of his business, or that it is even possible for this outlaw to be brought to justice. The law is helpless where there is no law enforcement. As Doniphon advises the newcomer, “Out here men take care of their own problems.”

Doniphon is the only man in town capable of standing up to Liberty, but as he himself hasn’t been robbed he doesn’t quite see why anyone else being robbed, let alone this geeky stranger, should be any business of his. Eventually, the idea of a larger civic responsibility begins to sink in—and, with it, a sense that it has become incumbent on him to do what no one else can do. Yet it can only be done outside the law, which remains powerless. This puts Doniphon and Liberty (the name is of course significant) on the same side. Both are outlaws whose would-be heroic struggle has no place in a civilized community. When Wayne triumphs, a way must be found for the townspeople to pretend that it is the law which has rid them of the depredations of Liberty and his gang, and a way duly is found. Stoddard is hailed as a hero and Doniphon, the real hero, is forgotten.

Ford’s film was a parable less of the coming of civilization to the West than of the cultural transformation that was taking place in the postwar period in America and elsewhere—a transformation which resulted in an early but unmistakable foreshadowing of the death of the hero in the 1970s.

Tom Doniphon does reject "a larger civic responsibility" in the early parts of the movie, but not nearly so emphatically as Mr. Bowman describes -- and not at all for the reason he suggests. First of all, Doniphon does help Ransom Stoddard in several ways: rescuing him on the trail, arranging to feed him until he can get back on his feet, and protecting him when Liberty Valance bullies him at the steakhouse. Because there is a code of honor at work, he must find a pretense to step in: the one he chooses is the steak lost when Stoddard is tripped by Liberty, which was Tom's own steak. In addition, he has a role in civic responsibility -- he helps to run the meeting to appoint delegates to the territorial convention.

What Doniphon does in terms of rejection is not done out of a sense of being 'on the same side as Liberty Valance,' that is, the side that is against law. He participates in the attempts to bring law to the territory. He just has other plans for himself, as he says plainly when turning down a nomination to be one of the delegates: and those plans are made crystal clear by the film. He loves Haley, has been building a home for her, plans to marry her, and wants only to live on his ranch with her in peace. What he does by way of rejecting a larger role in civic authority is done out of that love and that desire.

This is also why he is destroyed by the killing of Valance: not because it brings law to the territory, but because it loses him Haley forever. She had been moving increasingly into Stoddard's orbit, and in her reaction to Stoddard's survival and apparent victory against Liberty, Doniphon sees that he has lost everything he ever wanted. He destroys his home, never rebuilds it, and dies eventually in miserable poverty. Without her, he found nothing in life worth wanting.

It is also entirely wrong to say that "a way must be found for the townspeople to pretend that it is the law" that rid them of Liberty. The townspeople don't have to pretend: they have no idea that it wasn't Stoddard who did it. More, they aren't pretending that "the law" had anything to do with it: they love him for shooting Liberty in the street (as they believe that he did). And yet still more, it is absolutely plain that they loved Doniphon just as much -- he was their first choice for delegate, to a roaring approval from the crowd. Had he stepped out into the light and gunned down Liberty, in the name of stopping him from tormenting the people of the town any further, he would have been just as honored for the act as was Stoddard.

I don't wish to be too critical, because Bowman's larger point is well taken. Hollywood does need to do genuine heroism more often. They don't do it well very often at all anymore: Open Range stands, not quite alone, but in small company. The Western is too often overlooked, today: and our modern war movies are unspeakably terrible as a rule.

By the same token, Hollywood has long been able to do darker works, and there is much that can be valuable in it. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, as well as some of the other pieces he cites -- The Maltese Falcon, for example -- are wonderful movies that bear repeated viewing. Human nature has both bright and dark sides. We can profit greatly from reflection.

Originally posted at Grim's Hall; crossposted here on reflection, as I thought some of you might enjoy it.

« ok, I'm done now

Well, you get what you pay for...the knife never shows up. Seller explains that he mailed it. I explain that it didn't show up. Seller asks if one of my neighbors might have stolen it. I explain that that's unlikely since all three of them have keys to our house and could steal anything they wanted if they were so inclined. I ask if I need to deal with this through Paypal. He agrees to send mea new knife, registered mail, which he does.

He then demands payment for the new knife. I go "Huh?" and he says that the first one might still show up. I think about it, feel for the plight of the small businessman, and pay him, after getting his commitment that he'll refund my full payment on the 30th day after the order.

I'm generous, I guess. Well, the 30th day comes and goes, I remind him of his commitment to pay, and he replies:

I sent two knives in an act of good will. You never insured the first this your act of good will.................I have to say you've been the most unappreciative customer I've ever encountered. You just happen to throw away the packaging....................... You ain't entitled to nothing you should've gotten insurance but I think you got that one too........just cause you threw away the packaging........................ and start acting like your doing me a favor

I'll send you a refund just as we agreed you'll have it tomorrow

----- Original Message -----
From: "Marc Danziger"
To: "XXXXXXX"
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2008 7:02 PM
Subject: So where are we on this? > I've paid you for two knives - in a clear act of goodwill - when I've only received one.
>
> You committed to refund my money if I hadn't received the 1st knife on June 20 - which I haven't received.
>
> So where are we?
>
>
> Marc

He then refunds the cost of the knife, less shipping and Paypal fees. I've redacted his name because I don't want a long email hassle with him nor to improve his Google search ranking...

Then, on the other hand, there's Justin Winery.

We had our great dinner at Justin, and when we reserved it, did so as a part of a package that cost $(umpty) per person. When we got the bill, our knowledgeable and funny server Tim gave it to me because TG was - um, happy. From the wine and the meal. Very, extremely happy.

I paid it, noting in the back of my head that they hadn't charged us the 'package' price, but the menu price - which meant that we paid some $40 more.

Now I won't say that it was because I was - happy - too, or because I didn't want to bum the vibe of a great dinner. I just went "$40? eh." and paid it.

Now TG is my opposite in all matters financial. Had she been engaged with Jim the Knife Guy, she'd have laid brutal emails on him, shut down his PayPal account, and had his dog sent to the pound.

She goes through all our credit card statements, catching errors and saving me from my worst Charlie Sheen tendencies (or at least making sure I don't overtip). When she saw the $40, she hit the roof. I suggested we let it go, and apologized. She explained that she'd deal with me later (I may go into hiding).

Here's the email we received from Justin:

"Dear [TG],

I have read your account regarding what transpired last Thursday with your Dinner Transportation package out to Deborah’s Room. While I am elated that your overall experience was very positive, I am sorry we did not do such a good job in recognizing the fact you had booked our All Inclusive Transportation Package. I did speak to Timothy about this and he admits to making a mistake in recognizing and applying the correct pricing for your dinner. We are taking the necessary steps to communicate with our staff and avoid further misunderstandings with these packages. Hopefully, we have learned a lesson from this that will help us better manage this program.

JUST to give you some background perspective about our transportation program. Back in April of this year we decided to begin offering transportation out to Deborah’s Room and satisfy the innumerable requests from guests who expressed their desire to come to our lovely winery restaurant without being responsible for the driving. We decided to move forward and "trial balloon" this service, treading the fine line between offering the service at a fair price while at the same time making sure the JUSTIN staff delivering the services is being compensated fairly for their efforts. For simplicities sake we decided to adopt an all inclusive pricing policy instead of "a la carte". I am sorry that this became a source of confusion during your visit.

I want to thank you for taking the time to describe what happened. Your input is very valuable so we can "tweak" this program and be able to continue offering the service beyond this trail period. Also, I'm positively excited about Marc blogging about your experience and spreading the word about Deborah’s Room and our magical setting!!

I wish I could apply your overage to your next wine club shipment, but I think Rebecca has taken steps to credit your card directly for this amount. However, I do want to make myself personally available to you next time you plan on visiting JUSTIN. Please do not hesitate to contact me at the numbers below."

Short of sending us a case of '97 Isosceles (nice idea, but not called for), I'm not sure how it gets any better than that.

I'm not going to say that that's the only reason one businessman has an immensely successful winery and the other is selling knives out of his garage ... but it sure doesn't hurt.

My hat is off to Justin, and no, I'll never buy another knife from 'Jim' again. OTOH, the new Delicias are really nice - the clip is epoxy-covered and rounded, and the blade seems just a bit sharper than the old one.

« ok, I'm done now

For Egyptian intellectuals, the blow was even more devastating, as many of them realized that what had happened was, essentially, the defeat of a regime, and that what was being called a military setback was in fact an acute expression of that defeat. After boasting for years that its foundations were firmly set in steel, the regime had revealed its feet of clay on the morning of June 5, 1967, and the myth of its invincibility lay shattered on the sands of Sinai.
Traumatized by this shattering blow to their national pride, indeed, to their very being, an entire generation became dispersed. Some packed up and left for distant lands. Tens of thousands of educated young Egyptians emigrated to Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia, leaving behind them the motherland covered with the ashes of the conflagration. Others remained, their to serve their cause and compensate them for another kind of soldiering that had been crushed by defeat. Minds numb with shock, their values severely shaken. Still others found relief in throwing their lot in with extremist elements, which would make of them soldiers
But there were a few who, realizing that the defeat was more political than military, stayed and tried to understand why the regime had collapsed and, with it, the banners it had raised for fifteen years. I was one of those who believed that to describe what happened on the morning of June 5, 1967, as a military setback resulting from an American-Israeli conspiracy was to betray the conscience of the nation and to display the most supreme contempt for the intelligence of the people. After all, war is a continuation of politics by other means, and a military defeat is first and foremost a political defeat.
Ironically, that definition of war came to us from Marx and our Marxist mentors. It was Marx who first described war as an extension of politics and a solution to political problems, he who said it could only be characterized in political terms. Five years after the 1967 debacle, the concept had become well established in my mind. Extensive travels, to more than two hundred cities in over twenty countries, helped me understand the reasons for the regime's collapse in June, 1967. A first hand look at the experience of regimes modelled along the lines of Nasser's regime, such as those of Libya and Algeria, was instrumental in making me realize that the defeat of the Nasserite regime had been a natural, logical and inevitable result of the absence of light. Darkness can only breed darkness, and without bright and revealing light, no society can avoid slipping into an abyss like the one into which Egypt fell in 1967. The nature of the fall may vary, it could be military, economic or socio-political, but the final outcome is the same: defeat, collapse, loss of pride and a long shadow over the future. By absence of light is meant absence of democracy and the public freedoms that go with it. Democracy is the bright light that shines on the regime in power, its machinery, mechanisms and institutions. It is what protects society from the repetition of mistakes, from the ascendancy of negative aspects and from the dangers of building on brittle foundations. Only democracy can prevent the total collapse of a structure because of an error committed in the dark and only revealed by the final collapse.
Around 1970-71, this conviction had begun to take hold of me. At the time, I was attending gatherings in Marxist circles on an almost daily basis. When I ventured to suggest at one of these gatherings that the real reason for the disaster was the complete absence of democracy in the country, the reaction of those present was extremely hostile and they dismissed my analysis out of hand. I remember this was at a meeting which took place one morning in the summer of 1970, in the office of M.K., on the sixth floor of the Al-Ahram building in Cairo. This particular floor housed the offices of many Egyptian Marxists who had been arrested in 1954 and 1959 and who had remained in prison until 1964. Following their release, which came about as a result of growing Soviet influence in Egypt, they were given leading positions in the mass media.
Among those present that day were F.M. and I.S.A., each of whom had headed an important communist organization in the fifties and both of whom later became ministers. There was also M.S.A., considered by the Egyptian Marxists to be their main theoretician today. Several journalists from Al-Taliaa, all communists, were there, as were a number of communist university professors, like M.A., H.A., S.A.A., etc. In the course of the discussion, I referred to the 'setback' as being the defeat of a political regime. Although my analysis had not yet matured and even though I addressed the issue from a Marxist angle, backing my statement with direct quotes from Marx on war being an extension of politics, M.S.A. took it upon himself to interrupt me and to deliver a sermon, approved by all those present, on the proper interpretation of the 1967 defeat as being due to two factors:
One: The unholy alliance between the imperialist powers and Israel, both of whom had every interest in destroying the progressive socialist regime established by Nasser in Egypt, which had become a beacon of light for the Middle East, the Arab world and the African continent.
Two: The mistakes committed by Nasser's regime, which hindered completing socialist construction in Egypt. If Nasser had built socialism on a scientific (i.e. Marxist) basis rather than adopting selected socialist concepts, had he turned Egypt into an authentic socialist state (i.e. like those of Eastern Europe), things would have been different and there would have been no setback.
This categorical reply, designed to deter any tendency to read the military defeat of 1967 as a political defeat for the regime, only served to strengthen my growing belief that the military defeat was just one facet of the political defeat. The other facet was the economic defeat, which drained the treasury for almost five years following the war and turned the Egyptians into the paupers of the region.
My conviction that it was the darkness of Nasser's political regime which had plunged Egypt into military and economic defeat was further sustained over the next few years as we saw the same pattern being repeated, the same mistakes being committed, in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Algeria, where the absence of democracy was leading them in the direction of defeat.
The absence of democracy in socialist societies, where there is no respect for such public freedoms as freedom of thought, of opinion, of expression, of opposition and of criticism, is rooted in Marxist thought. Marx, Engels and, later, Lenin, convinced their followers that the non-Marxist concept of democracy was fake and deceptive and that the freedom which the bourgeoisie claimed was guaranteed by their democracy was no more than the freedom of the exploiting minority to pursue their exploitation of the exploited majority. The disdain for what they pejoratively refer to as `bourgeois parliamentarism' is deeply ingrained in all Marxists. This disdain was colorfully expressed by Lenin, who called parliamentary democracy a 'pigsty'. It was also Lenin who said:
"To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament - such is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics."
In the same vein, Lenin described representative institutions as `talking shops' and social democrats as `lap dogs'. He said: "Parliament itself is given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the 'common people'. This is so true that even in the Russian Republic, a bourgeois-democratic republic, all these sins of parliamentarism were immediately revealed, even before it managed to set up a real parliament. The heroes of rotten philistinism, such as the Skobelevs and Tseretelis, the Chernovs and Avksentyevs, have even succeeded in polluting the Soviets after the fashion of most disgusting bourgeois parliamentarism and to convert them into mere talking shops."
A careful reading of Marx, Engels and Lenin will show that they affirm the impossibility of combining between the state and freedom and democracy, since democracy in non-communist societies stands for the state regime and the state stands for exploitation and oppression. In an introduction to a series of articles published just one and a half years before his death and eleven years after the death of Marx, Engels says that the communist party can never use the term social/democrat, because it is a party whose ultimate political objective is to transcend the state altogether and, consequently, democracy as well. In 1917, Lenin developed this theme as follows:
In the usual arguments about the state, the mistake is constantly made against which Engels uttered his warning and which we have in passing indicated above, namely, it is constantly forgotten that the abolition of the state means also the abolition of democracy; that the withering away of the state means the withering away of democracy.
At first sight, this assertion seems exceedingly strange and incomprehensible; indeed, someone may even begin to fear that we are expecting the advent of an order of society in which the principle of the subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed - for democracy means the recognition of just this principle.
No, democracy is NOT identical with the subordination of the minority to the majority. Democracy is a state which recognizes the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e., an organization for the systematic use of violence by one class against the other, by one section of the population against another."
Lenin was also the one to call the democracy of capitalist society "democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich...", noting that Marx had "grasped the essence of capitalist democracy when, in analyzing the experience of the (Paris) Commune, he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!"
In "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism", Lenin wrote: "Imperialism is the era of financial capital and the monopolies which everywhere tends towards domination not freedom." CHECK... He devotes an entire book, "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky", written in October/November 1918, to developing the theme of Western democracy being a game used by the dominant class to consolidate its exploitation and privileges. To this end, he invokes Rosa Luxemburg's description of German Social-Democracy as "a stinking corpse". In a chapter entitled "Bourgeois and Proletarian Democracy", Lenin says:
"If we are not to mock at common sense and history, it is obvious that we cannot speak of 'pure democracy' so long as different classes exist; we can only speak of class democracy. (Be it said in parenthesis that 'pure democracy' is not only an ignorant phrase, revealing a lack of understanding both of the class struggle and of the nature of the state, but also a thrice-empty phrase, since in communist society democracy will wither away in the process of changing and becoming a habit, but will never be 'pure' democracy.)
"Pure democracy" is the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers. History knows of bourgeois democracy which takes the place of feudalism, and of proletarian democracy which takes the place of bourgeois democracy."
In the same chapter, Lenin launches his most violent diatribe yet against Western democracy, parliaments and the idea of parliamentary representation: "The learned Mr. Kautsky has 'forgotten' - accidentally forgotten, probably... a 'trifle', namely, that the ruling party in a bourgeois democracy extends the protection of the minority only to another bourgeois party, while on all serious, profound and fundamental issues the proletariat gets martial law or pogroms, instead of the 'protection of the minority'. The more highly developed a democracy is, the more imminent are pogroms or civil war in connection with any profound political divergence which is dangerous to the bourgeoisie."
Tens of similar passages can be found in the works of Trotsky and Mao Tse-tung. According to the former, the problems between the proletariat and others `can only be resolved by blood and steel.' It was also Trotsky who boasted that the Bolsheviks had never paid heed to Hegel's `babble about the sanctity of human life'. In fact, it was Marxism's inbuilt propensity for violence that led Kautsky to attack it, thereby incurring Lenin's wrath. Mao Tse-tung is even more blunt: "Our state is that of the people's democratic dictatorship, led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants." Defining the functions of that dictatorship, he says its first task is on the internal front, where it must suppress the reactionary classes, exploiters, all those standing against the socialist revolution and all those working to subvert socialist construction, "in order to resolve the contradictions between us and our enemies inside the country. Among the functions of the proletariat, for example, is to arrest and sentence anti-revolutionary elements and to deprive landowners and bourgeois bureaucrats of their right to vote and of freedom of speech."
In an article published on February 27, 1957, under the title "The Proper Treatment of the Contradictions Between the Rights of the People", Mao reiterates the views he expressed on June 23, 1950, in the closing address he delivered at the Second Consultative Political Congress of the Chinese People, in which he said: "The people's democratic dictatorship follows two paths: against the enemies, it follows the path of dictatorship, i.e., for a necessary period of time, the enemies are not allowed to participate in political activity..."Elsewhere, Mao explains the essence of what he calls democratic dictatorship, noting that it is based on:
- Subordination of the minority to the majority;
- Subordination of the majority to the Party;
- Subordination of the Party to the Central Committee.
The Marxist doctrine requires Marxists to reject parliamentary democracy and to build their proletarian democracy on the elimination of all other classes and, by extension, of their political organizations, i.e., their parties. Thus a Marxist who comes to power cannot allow freedom of political opposition nor freedom to form parties, because all parties other than the communist party represent classes at war with the proletariat. As Lenin put it bluntly: "once the proletariat seizes power, it must impose a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters and the capitalists." To drive the point home, he points out that "It is clear (that) when there is suppression, when there is violence (on the part of the proletariat), there is no freedom and no democracy.... Democracy for the vast majority of the people (the proletariat) and suppression by force, i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people - this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism."
Under communist rule, therefore, indeed, under any of the regimes which revolve, to varying degrees, in the communist orbit, parliamentary democracy is regarded with deep suspicion. Political opponents are class enemies that the regime should crush, not engage in dialogue with, and who should not be given a forum from which to speak out against the interests of the proletariat. In this logic, all who stand with them are `comrades', all who do not are `enemies', towards whom the only possible language is repression. As they see it, freedom of thought cannot be absolute. On the one hand, nothing is absolute from the philosophical point of view and, on the other, thought is subordinate to economic and class interests and any thought that does not express the interests of the working class is a deviation to be suppressed. Thus freedom of expression is viewed from one single political prism: that of the party, which sets itself up as the sole representative of the proletarian majority. The twin concepts of freedom of thought and freedom of expression, inherited from a long evolutionary process in human thought and culture, have no place in a society ruled by communists.
The same narrow perspective is applied to the press and literature in communist societies. The press must be in the hands of the representatives of the proletariat, not in the hands of its enemies; it must defend only the interests of the workers and make war on their enemies; no party or trend other than the communist party can have access to the press...As to `human literature', it is a meaningless expression, for literature is one of the components of the superstructure and a reflection of the economic basis of society. In a society ruled by communists, literature should be concerned solely with the problems and interests of the working class. From all these concepts the ideal society is formed: the Soviet Union, with its conception of freedom of the press, of opinion and of political opposition.
It is true that the seventies and eighties saw the West European communists, particularly the Italian, French and Spanish communist parties, rejecting the traditional Marxist view of democracy and proclaiming their belief in Western parliamentary democracy and political pluralism as embodied in the multi-party system. But it is also true that they did so only because they knew that unless they affirmed their respect for democratic values, their own societies, where these values were firmly entrenched, would continue to reject them. For the peoples of the Western democracies firmly believe in the importance of public scrutiny - or the light of democracy - in revealing errors and preventing negative trends in good time. But whatever the motivation of the Eurocommunists, their doctrine, officially described by the Soviets in 1972 as `provocative' (in the review, "The Contemporary Nation"), met with implacable opposition from orthodox Marxists.
In short, the lessons drawn from the Nasserite experience in Egypt and similar experiences in other, as well as the record of societies ruled by countries communist parties or pro-communist regimes, prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the nature of Marxism, as a philosophical and political school of thought, as well as in its practical application to date, is in total contradiction with the notion of democracy as it has evolved in Western societies and as it is reflected today in Britain, the United States, France, etc. By its very nature, Marxism inevitably leads to the suppression of freedom of thought, of opinion, of political opposition and of the press, and cannot admit of any mechanism that would put political life under the light of democracy and reveal it to the public eye, so that defects do not remain hidden until they erupt in the form of a disaster such as a military, political, economic or social setback.
Anyone who has read Soviet `samizdat' (Russian for `underground') literature cannot fail to be struck by the negative aspects of Marxist theory and practice. The list of Soviet dissidents who have written of the brutal repression to which they were subjected, the years they spent in labour camps and psychiatric hospitals, the persecution of their families and friends is an impressive one. Among the names that spring to mind: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Roy Medvedev, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anatoly Marchenko, Mikhail Sholokhov, Yuli M. Daniel (alias Nikolai Argak), Andrei Sinyavsky (alias Abraham Tertz), Aleksandr Ginsburg, Larya Gurz, Yury Galanskov, Pavel Leptvinov, Valentin Moroz...
The long hours spent reading the works of dissident Soviet authors, particularly Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Anatoly Marchenko, helped confirm my belief that the aberrations they describe are all due to what I termed, in a lecture delivered on April 29, 1979, at the University of Asuncion, the darkness resulting from the absence of any mechanisms of illumination in societies subscribing to the Marxist concept of democracy. This concept is closely related to another, that of revolutionary, or socialist, legitimacy. The notion of constitutional legitimacy born of mankind's long struggle to obtain civil liberties and protect human rights by devising a system of checks and balances whereby the political authority is accountable to the people and the powers of the ruler are strictly defined by constitutional and legislative texts, is totally rejected by Marxism, both in theory and in practice. For Marxists, who see everything from the perspective of class struggle, legitimacy means anything that serves that struggle. Indeed, the only constraint on the actions of the proletariat when it is performing its historic mission to propel society forward from capitalism to socialism - while abolishing all other classes in the process - is that these actions must serve the interests of the proletariat. This elastic proposition lends itself easily to abuse: the political authority can justify any excess in the name of the interests of the proletariat. Hence the dismal human rights record of all communist regimes, where purges and brutal repression of any opposition, in flagrant violation of the basic principles of legitimacy as established by centuries of human struggle, are justified as necessary to protect the interests of the working class.
The years 1917 to 1921 witnessed the worst such violations in the Soviet Union, when the entire judicial system was subsumed under the banner of `revolutionary legitimacy' to serve one man's vision of political expediency. During that black period, Stalin liquidated his opponents, murdered millions of his countrymen and held the infamous Moscow trials.
The same banner was raised by Gamal Abdel Nasser to justify eliminating all his opponents from 1954 onwards. Under that banner, thousands of Moslems were massacred in Syria. Such leaders as Castro, Ben Bella, Boumedienne, Gaddafi, successive rulers in Aden, Agostinho Neto, Miriam Mengistou, Abdel Kerim Kassem and Abdel Fattah Ismail applied what they called revolutionary legitimacy in their respective countries to `protect the revolution and the interests of the people'.
However, it is not by reading the mass of theoretical works written on the subject that one can judge between the relative merits of the two notions of legitimacy. For oppression, like freedom, can be theoretically justified, and honeyed words on the need to repress injustice, tyranny and exploitation can act like a heady brew, particularly on headstrong young people with a natural enthusiasm for fiery slogans. The real test lies in practical application, and there is no disputing the horrible crimes committed by communist regimes in the area of human rights. Under the banner of revolutionary legitimacy, they have trampled underfoot all public freedoms and silenced all dissent. The picture is very different under a constitutional democracy, which is not, as Lenin called it, a charade, but a system designed to prevent abuses of power and to protect public freedoms. Democracy is the torch that illuminates the workings of the state and lays them bare for all to see. No one can claim that democracy has created the ideal paradise, only that its revealing light prevents the tyranny and injustice that occur in the darkness of dictatorial rule, whatever its nature: Marxist, Fascist, Nazi, military or theocratic.
The tragedy of the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Tse-tung in the mid-sixties is a glaring example of where the concepts of revolutionary legitimacy, proletarian democracy, committed communist literature, etc., can lead. But the price of the lesson was exorbitant in terms of human suffering and it was a lesson humanity could have done without. Sadly, many people in the third world seem to have learned nothing from the Chinese experience.
For some strange reason, none of those who have been seduced by the Marxist concept of democracy ever ask themselves why no communist ruler has ever left power except for one of two reasons: death or a coup d'etat. Nor do they question why each communist ruler begins his reign by denouncing that of his predecessor. Not one of them wonders how Tsarist Russia, with all its social inequities, produced such towering figures as Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoi, Chekov, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov and scores of others, whereas the dictatorship of the proletariat has produced no creative works other than those of the dissidents who turned against the regime.
This perception of constitutional democracy is dictated by the moral code of Marxism. Morality is determined in Marxist eyes by reference to the proletarian revolution: whatever serves the cause of the revolution is moral, anything else is not. With this in mind, how can we see the behaviour of communists in Western democracies, who have suddenly become apostles of pluralism and constitutional democracy, as anything but inconsistent? While traditional Marxists admit that their ultimate aim in participating in political life in non-proletarian states (i.e., Western democracies) is to promote the proletarian revolution by smashing the machinery of state - political institutions, parliamentary, or bourgeois, democracy, etc., they are the first to loudly condemn any violation of democracy and the staunchest supporters of the freedoms it guarantees, such as freedom of opinion and of expression.
It is hard to reconcile this attitude with what Engels himself said in his address to the First International London Conference on September 11, 1871, to whit: "Political freedoms, such as the right of assembly and freedom to publish and print are our weapon. Can we, then, remain with our hands tied and boycott politics if they try to seize this weapon from us? It is said that any political activity means recognizing the existing system. But as long as that system places in our hands the weapons with which to fight, then using those weapons does not mean recognizing the existing system."
In other words, the communists have no qualms about using the channels and privileges available to them under a system of bourgeois parliamentary democracy to achieve their ultimate aim of destroying that system. For they are aware that under a democracy they cannot come to power as Lenin and his cohorts did in the anarchy that prevailed in Russia in October 1917 or through a military takeover. Their use of democratic channels to preach communist ideas, fan the flames of class struggle and spread rumours against their opponents is a blatant example of the immoral opportunism of communists, which they consider entirely moral from their neo-Machiavellan point of view.
Western democracies seem oblivious to this threat to their very existence. Surely the essential condition for participation in democratic life should be a profound belief in democracy and a desire to protect and maintain it? Anyone who does not satisfy that condition should be barred from exercising the right to participate in political activities in Western democracies. It is absurd for people who have learned from long historical experience that parliamentary democracy is all that stands between them and tyranny and despotism to allow those who call for its destruction to operate under its umbrella. Especially when the traditional Marxists, like those in the third world, declare their Leninist aim of replacing bourgeois democracy by proletarian democracy.
We are not alone in finding the behaviour of Marxists in Western democracies inconsistent and immoral. The accusation of immorality has been levelled against them by many European intellectuals sympathetic to Marxism, like Howard Lasky, who described the behaviour of communists outside the Soviet Union as "deceptive, ruthless, iniquitous, willing to resort to lies and treachery to achieve their end and unscrupulously falsifying facts to suit their purpose." Nor is the immoral behaviour of the communists limited to the period before they seize power. The slogans they raise when they participate in political life under a democracy are soon forgotten when they come to power. In fact, the allies who stand by them in their struggle to attain power are usually their first victims. A notorious example is how the Mencheviks, who had stood by the Bolsheviks in their struggle, were liquidated by Lenin soon after he came to power. The opportunistic communist attitude with regard to parliamentary democracy is best expressed by Lenin himself in "`Left-Wing' Communism, an Infantile Disorder", published in Russia in June 1920. Among the most explicit Marxist texts upholding the legitimacy of anything that serves the proletarian revolution is chapter eight of the said book, in which he bitterly denounces the German `Left' communists who dared criticize the Bolsheviks for compromising with bourgeois parties, noting that: "....the German Lefts must know that the whole history of Bolshevism, both before and after the October Revolution, is full of instances of manoeuvring, temporizing and compromising with other parties, bourgeois parties included." Developing this theme further, he asks: "To carry on a war for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie, a war which is a hundred times more difficult, protracted and complicated than the most stubborn of ordinary wars between states, and to refuse beforehand to manoeuvre, to utilize the conflict of interests (even though temporary) among one's enemies, to refuse to temporize and compromise with possible (even though temporary, unstable, vacillating and conditional) allies - is not this ridiculous in the extreme?"
During a spell abroad in the first half of the seventies, I devoted myself to the study of hundreds of volumes written during the early years of the great Islamic civilization, particularly the works of eminent Islamic jurists compiled in a volume entitled Bab Al Jihad. I often found myself comparing the immorality of the communists with the chivalry displayed by the early Moslems in all their wars, starting with the Battle of Badr. The history of Islam is rich in examples of noble stands. One example that springs to mind is that of Imam Ali Ibn Abi Taleb, who could have had the whole world at his feet if he had gone against the dictates of his conscience. When he was offered the caliphate after the assassination of Omar on condition that he pledge not to be as strict as Omar, he refused - thereby sacrificing a position that would have brought virtually the whole world at the time under his rule. His words to his opponents at the Battle of Al Gamal are just the opposite of the communist creed that the end - the accession to power, the furthering of the proletarian revolution, etc.- justifies the means. Another case in point is Saladdin, who met every underhanded plot hatched against him by the Crusaders with chivalry and gallantry. In recent times, this noble tradition was upheld by the late King Feisal of Saudi Arabia who, despite the vicious attacks launched against him by the Nasser regime, was the first to rush to Nasser's support at the Khartoum Conference of 1967, following the regime's defeat.
The very narrow Marxist concept of democracy as being proletarian democracy and none other not only shapes the attitude of the communists to other parties and trends, but also their attitude to fellow communist party members. Right after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and established the dictatorship of the proletariat, the question of whether or not to allow freedom of opinion within the party was decisively settled. Actually, the question had been raised as early as 1903, when a bitter debate broke out over whether the communist organization should be a tight organization, in the sense of high centralization and iron discipline, or a loose one, encompassing various communist tendencies. The concept of a tight organization, championed by Lenin, won the day. Lenin came under strong attack for his stand from several leaders of the communist movement both inside Russia, like Trotsky, and outside, like Rosa Luxembourg in Germany. In "Our Political Duties", Trotsky went as far as to compare Lenin to Robespierre. Under the pressure of so many attacks, Lenin published "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back" in 1904, in which he violently attacked the advocates of an open communist society and their description of democracy as being the rule of the people by the people. He declared that the idea of organization, so essential to the communist movement, could not be fulfilled without the total submission of the minority to the majority inside the party and that anyway he could conceive of no opposition within the party save from `opportunistic, non- revolutionary elements'. He reiterated the same views later, when he boasted in "`Left-Wing' Communism, an Infantile Disorder", published in 1920, that "the application of the dictatorship of the proletariat would have been impossible without an iron party."
After Lenin's death, the debate flared up again between Stalin and his bitter enemy, Trotsky. The former adhered strictly to the Lenin line and advocated the idea of a tightly-controlled party in "The Foundations of Leninism" in 1924 and "Problems of Leninism" in 1926. Trotsky, for his part, continued to defend the idea of an open party - especially when it became apparent that Lenin was closer to power than he was - that would cooperate with the Mencheviks and all the other parties whose support had helped the Bolsheviks come to power and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Trotsky's views on the matter are forcefully expressed in "The New Method", which he wrote in 1923. But, in the event, it was Stalin's theory which ultimately prevailed, and Trotsky's call for an open party has never been applied in any state ruled by the dictatorship of the proletariat as embodied in a communist party. The formula of a narrow party applied by Lenin and Stalin was also applied by Mao in China, where the communist party was quick to eliminate any trend that did not stricly adhere to the path he laid out. Under various banners, the most famous being the Cultural Revolution, the most brutal methods were used to correct any deviation from this path.
Thus the absence of the light of democracy is an inbuilt feature of communist rule that affects not only its enemies but also those of its followers who do not see eye to eye with the ruler. An area which provides ample evidence of this is the literature of Soviet dissidents and their trials and tribulations in defense of human rights. While a full analysis of the issue would go beyond the scope of this essay, the story of one of them can serve as a representative case history for all of them.
The life of the Nobel laureate, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from the day he was born in 1918 until he was deported from the Soviet Union in 1974, epitomizes the brutal oppression visited by the Soviet Union on its citizens. In this model communist society, which serves as a shining example of the successful implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat to all the others, fundamental freedoms are conspicuously absent and human rights violations the order of the day.
Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 at Kislovodsk. Six years later, his father was killed in an accident, and his mother moved with him to Rostov-on-the-Don, where she worked as a typist. Life was hard in the early days of Stalin's rule, especially for a young widow and her orphaned son. Young Alexander was an outstanding student from primary school and up to Rostov University, where his genius in mathematics and physics won him a scholarship for graduate studies. Throughout those years, Solzhenitsyn remained true to his love for culture in general and literature in particular, and took a correspondence course in literature at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History. He obtained his diploma from the Institute in 1941, one year following his appointment as teacher of mathematics at a secondary school in Rostov.
During those years, he tried to publish his novels and short stories in the literary review, Znamya, but they were all rejected by the editor. When Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union began, Solzhenitsyn joined the Red Army as an artillery officer on October 18, 1941, and fought at the battles of Kursk and Konigsberg (later Kaliningrad). His heroism earned him several promotions, and by 1945 he was a captain with two decorations for bravery in defense of his country: the Order of the Patriotic War, Class II, and the Order of the Red Star.
In July 1945, he was suddenly arrested by the secret police, the NKVD, and charged with making derogatory remarks about Stalin in private correspondence with a friend and in his personal diary. He was detained without trial in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow pending further investigation of his case by the secret police, and then sentenced by a special tribunal of the NKVD to eight years hard labour as a traitor to Leninist socialism and to the socialist society. Solzhenitsyn served his sentence in a number of Soviet prisons, but instead of releasing him when his term was up in 1953, the secret police arbitrarily decided to exile him to Kok Tern in the Dzhambul region of Kazakhstan, where he remained until 1956. During his exile, it was discovered that he had cancer and he was sent to a hospital in Tashkent to undergo treatment.
For more than eleven years of imprisonment and exile, Solzhenitsyn underwent horrible sufferings which he movingly describes in "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". The novel is considered a literary masterpiece in its description of the sufferings of hundreds of thousands of detainees in the Soviet Union, although I, personally, share the opinion of the Daily Telegraph's literary critic who considers "My Testimony" by Anatoly Marchenko to be the best account of life in Russian prisons and labour camps since Dostoevsky's "House of the Dead". Solzhenitsyn uses the same setting for his play, "The Tender Foot and the Tramp". His outstanding novel, "Cancer Ward", recounts his experience with exile and his brush with death from cancer. During his years of imprisonment and exile, his family knew nothing about him. Thinking him dead, his wife remarried but went back to him after his release (1956) and his rehabilitation (1957).
In 1956, his case was reviewed by the Military Section of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union, which issued the following ruling under No. 4N/083/56: "On February 6, 1956, the Court examined the appeal raised by the Military Prosecutor against the decision passed by the Fifth Tribunal of the NKVD on June 7, 1945, and predicated on paragraphs 10 and 11 of article 58 of the RSFSR Criminal Code, sentencing to eight years imprisonment in correctional labour camps Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, born in 1918 in the city of Kislovodsk, holder of the highest scientific awards and commander of an artillery unit before his detention who fought in the war against the Fascist German armies and was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, Class II, and the Order of the Red Star. Having heard the report of comrade Konev and the statement of Colonel Terkov, Assistant Military Prosecutor, the Court rules as follows: the charges against Solzhenitsyn which are that between 1940 and 1945 he committed acts of anti-Soviet propaganda among his friends and took steps aimed at forming an anti-Soviet organization are declared null and void for absence of proof of the alleged crimes...."
Throughout these years, all Solzhenitsyn's attempts to publish his works were met with adamant refusal. However, in November 1962, Khrushchev himself authorized publication of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", Solzhenitsyn's harrowing novel about life in a Siberian labour camp under Stalin, in the context of Khrushchev's destalinisation policy. After Khrushchev's downfall in 1964, Solzhenitsyn again became persona non grata and was the target of violent attacks by official Soviet writers. But by then, which is around the time the literary dissident's movement was born, he had acquired many supporters and admirers. The attacks continued for almost ten years, during which the author was accused of being a traitor to socialism and an agent of American imperialist powers. He was persecuted in his private life and transferred from one place to another. The attacks reached a crescendo when he was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature and continued unabated until he left the Soviet Union in 1974.
Those who have followed the case closely affirm that Solzhenitsyn would have been assassinated or locked up in a psychiatric institution like so many others had it not been for the support of the free world and of the European communist parties, particularly those of Italy, France and Spain, and had his case not become a cause celebre at the centre of world public opinion.
Although the case of Solzhenitsyn provoked a great political furor and much international publicity, the history of communist societies is rife with similar, albeit less sensational, cases. The moral to be drawn from the story of Alexander Solzhenitsyn is that in communist societies, where the rule of law is replaced by `revolutionary legitimacy', there is no room for divergent views, which are invariably branded as anti-revolutionary and imperialist. In fact, conformity or otherwise to `revolutionary legitimacy' is determined at the sole discretion of whoever happens to be in power at any given time. The vicissitudes of Solzhenitsyn's fortunes prove just how flexible the concept of revolutionary democracy is:
1- At a first phase, he was a legendary hero who had fought valiantly for the socialist fatherland and had been decorated twice for bravery.
2- At a second phase, he was accused of betraying that same fatherland and sentenced to eleven years hard labour in the Siberian labour camps.
3- A third phase saw an upward turn in his fortunes. He was absolved by the Supreme Court of the crimes for which he had paid with eleven years of his life and nominated for the Lenin Prize in 1963 for "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". Solzhenitsyn's rehabilitation did not mean that the climate of tyranny and oppression had changed, but only that his writings served the interests of the new rulers.
4- With Khrushchev's fall, a new stage in the decline of Solzhenitsyn's official standing began. Once again he was denounced as an agent, a traitor, an enemy of socialism and a mediocre writer.
What emerges from Solzhenitsyn's life and writings, especially in the period between 1967 and 1974, and from all that has been written about him in the Soviet Union and abroad is that under communist rule, art and literature are tolerated only to the extent that they serve the regime and echo its slogans, regardless of intrinsic value. Since the October Revolution, the Soviet Union has regarded its artists and writers as foot soldiers in its war against the enemy, deploying them to trumpet the victories of the regime and attack its critics. A look at the novels, plays, short stories and literary articles published in the Soviet Union since 1917 will show how the functional role assigned by the political leadership to literature and art has devitalized these traditionally strong forms of expression and rendered them sterile. It is enough to compare the works put out after 1917 by the 'approved' authors, whose names are listed in the Soviet Encyclopedia, with those of the great pre-revolutionary Russian writers, to realize the extent of the tragedy. That the Soviets regard authors as instruments to be used for the furtherance of the regime's interests is clear from many official statements issued by the Soviet Writers' Union and from numerous articles which have appeared in Pravda. A statement worth quoting here is that delivered on October 5, 1967, by the editor-in-chief of Pravda, M.F. Ziemanin, at the Press House in Leningrad:
"The Western press has recently been full of malicious fabrications, using many of our writers whose works have reached the hands of our enemies. The camp formed by the Western press to defend Tarsis only stopped its activities when Tarsis left for the West, thereby proving that he - Tarsis - was not sound of mind. Nowadays, Solzhenitsyn is at the centre of capitalist propaganda. He too is psychologically unbalanced. He is a schizophrenic, a former prisoner who was subjected to oppression, deservedly or otherwise, and is now seeking revenge against the Soviet government through his literary works. The only topic he seems able to write about is life in the labour camps, it has become a kind of obsession with him. Solzhenitsyn's works are an attack against the Soviet regime in which he sees nothing but bitterness and cancerous growths. He sees nothing positive in our society.
By virtue of my functions, I have access to unpublished works. One of these was Solzhenitsyn's play, "The Feast of the Victors", which deals with the persecution of those who returned from the front. It is an example of the anti-Soviet literature for which people in the past were imprisoned.
Clearly, we cannot publish his works, that is his one wish that we cannot gratify. However, if he were to write stories that are in keeping with the interest of society, we will publish them. Solzhenitsyn will not want for bread and butter; he is a teacher of physics, let him teach. He likes to make public speeches and to read his works to an audience...he was given the opportunity to do so...He considers himself a literary genius."
This text clearly expresses where literature stands in the country that, in a previous age, gave humanity some of its greatest writers and composers. Today, any literary work that does not conform strictly to the general line of the state is considered to be anti-Soviet and serving reactionary imperialist forces. The problem is that the general line of the state differs from one ruler to the next - Lenin to Stalin, the transition to Khrushchev, then to Brezhnev and so on and so forth. How can talents grow and develop when they are circumscribed by the party line? How can literature be expected to fulfill its traditional function of educating, enlightening and correcting society in such circumstances? Literature not only holds up the mirror in which society can see itself reflected, but, as the light which seeks out and reveals all that is negative in that society - in the political, economic and social spheres - is a vital tool for democracy, working relentlessly in the interest of society as a whole.
Repression in socialist societies, headed by the Soviet Union, has not only emptied literature of its essence and transformed it into an organ of state, it has created a new model of morality characterized by social apathy and selfishness. Those who think that the Soviet people are all dissidents, whether overt or covert, are mistaken. Apart from a small group, the Soviet people have been shaped by sixty years of a repressive police state into a unique moral mould.
First of all, the ordinary Soviet citizen has a totally unrealistic picture of the outside world, created by the all-powerful communist media which, as we mentioned in our book, "Communism and Religions", is the most dangerous weapon in the hands of the communists, whether before they come to power or after. He believes that workers in the United States, France, West Germany, Canada and Britain live lives of poverty, suffering and humiliation. As the Russian writer Lidiya Chukovskaya puts it, a huge wall has been erected between him and the outside world. A good example of the ability of the Soviet media to shape the minds of Soviet citizens according to the party line and in total disregard of accuracy and truth is given by Hedrick Smith in his book, "The Russians". As the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times in the early seventies, Smith had come to know Andrei Sakharov well. Known as the father of the Soviet H-bomb, full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences at the age of thirty-two, Sakharov had donated all his savings, some 140 thousand roubles (representing the proceeds of the huge financial privileges he had received as a member of the elite club of Soviet nuclear scientists, which Sakharov says were paid to him secretly in sealed envelopes), to a government fund for a new cancer research centre.
In 1974, Smith met a prominent Soviet medical scientist. The conversation turned to Sakharov and the scientist, unaware that Smith knew him personally, volunteered the information that Sakharov was mentally unbalanced. When Smith disclosed that he was personally acquainted with Sakharov, the scientist leant over to whisper in his ear: "And how was he when you met him? Is he really mad?"
Sakharov himself had a similar experience while on holiday at a Black Sea resort. He became friendly with a group of Soviet intellectuals, to whom he did not disclose his real identity. For days on end they spoke to him of Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet H-bomb who had become a raving madman. In an interview with the Swedish radio correspondent, Olle Stenholm, Sakharov expressed the situation very well:
"I am skeptical about socialism in general. I don't see that socialism offers some kind of new theoretical plan, so to speak, for the better organization of society...We have the same kind of problems - that is, crime and personal alienation - that are to be found in the capitalist world. But our society represents an extreme case with maximum restraint, maximum ideological restrictions, and so forth...Moreover, and very characteristically, we are also the most pretentious - that is, although we are not the best society we pretend that we are much more..."
The situation described by Sakharov is the natural outcome of the role assigned by the party in the Soviet Union to thought, literature and to the mass media, whose discipline to the party line can be likened to that of military troops in battle to their commander: unthinking obedience. If we compare the role of the Soviet mass media to that of the American. which were instrumental in bringing about the downfall of the president because of the Watergate scandal, we would immediately see the difference between what the Soviets denigrate as bourgeois democracy' and their brand of revolutionary democracy. Another small example is worth giving here. In the United States, Western democracy has created a new profession in the field of medicine: a representative of the media who is in contact with hospitals and medical centres to track down any cases of malpractice. Any suspicion of malpractice is followed by a thorough investigation and, if confirmed, the media launch a strong campaign with serious consequences for the person or persons responsible, including civil liability. This system is just one of many which have emerged in various fields as positive byproducts of the democratic process and its integration in all aspects of life in Western societies.180 An interesting comparison here is the account of Soviet medical facilities given by Solzhenitsyn in "Cancer Ward". Throughout the six hundred pages of the novel, we are given a bitter description of medical services in a state that boasts the best free medical care in the world.
The glaring discrepancy between reality and the image projected by the mass media is not limited to the field of medicine, but is a phenomenon that extends to all aspects of life in the Soviet Union. In fact, it is a natural consequence of the peculiar concept of democracy prevailing in the Soviet Union, where any opinion that does not conform to the official line is regarded as seditious talk by agents in the pay of foreign enemies. According to Sakharov, Soviet citizens have been brainwashed by the Soviet media into believing that no one on the face of the earth tells the truth for the sake of truth. The world is divided into parties and everyone belongs to one or the other of these parties, to which he gives his full loyalty. This belief, nurtured by the Soviet mass media, has allowed the regime to keep the intelligentsia in line and to immunize most of the Soviet people against what they hear from the Western world. Certainly too, the State's monopoly over the job market helps it maintain its grip on people who are totally dependent on it for their livelihood.
Those who do step out of line pay a heavy price. To cite but a few examples: Daniel and Sinyavsky spent more than five years in prison camps for smuggling out of the Soviet Union literary works that the authorities considered slanderous to the Soviet state; the poetess Natalya Gorpanyevskaya lost her job and was committed to a mental institution because she took part in a demonstration held in Red Square to protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; the historian Anatoly Petrovesky was dismissed from his job and blacklisted because he signed a statement in support of Daniel and Sinyavsky; the members of Sakharov's immediate family were persecuted simply because of their association with him,181 and so on and so forth. All this confirms the validity of Harold Lasky's proposition that a people who relinquish their political rights in exchange for promises of economic security will soon discover that they struck a losing bargain, for there is nothing they can do if the promises are not kept.
It took me many years of reading, of following up the activities of various communist parties and frequenting their leaderships, especially in Egypt, Algeria and Morocco, to realize just how deeply shrouded in darkness are the societies or groups which fall under the influence of Marxism. When I look back, the evidence was right there before my eyes all through the period I was meeting regularly with veteran Egyptian communists. Those meetings, at which Marxist texts were reverently quoted as though they were holy scriptures, were a microcosm of communist societies, with their intolerance for the other opinion and their use of heavy-handed methods to silence all dissent, not to mention their open advocacy of using all and any means to achieve the desired end. I remember L.K. saying one day in 1972 that the regime would be digging its own grave the day it introduced western-style representative democracy in the country, which is in fact what the regime tried to do less than three years later. I remember too that they were all for forming an alliance with the Islamic groups whose star was in the ascendancy, especially on university campuses, by building a common ground with what they called leftist Islamic trends.
On the evening of September 9, 1972, I attended what was to be my last meeting with my former comrades. It marked a turning point in my life, a rite of passage, as it were, from darkness into light. Many of the pundits of the Egyptian communist movement were gathered in the office of their mentor, L.K., editor of the monthly magazine which served as a forum for the dissemination of Marxist views among Egyptian and Arab intellectuals at the time. The discussion centered on the fires that had destroyed the Cairo Opera and the Jawhara Palace near the Citadel. L.K. lectured his listeners on the importance of these events as revolutionary moments that, if properly handled, could trigger a revolutionary movement that would hasten the transition to socialism and from there to the higher stage of communism. He spoke with his usual eloquence, and his audience was spellbound by the vision of destruction and revolution he invoked. At that point, I interrupted to say that I rejected this characterization of the two events, which I considered to be crimes against the nation. This undisciplined outburst from a twenty-two year old was not to be tolerated. L.K. launched into a personal attack, in which he accused me of being a prisoner of the filthy bourgeois values I had grown up with. He warned that, as the avant-garde of the progressive movement in Egypt, we must not - and I quote - feel any nationalist kinship with the enemies of the people, the blood-suckers who kept them in humiliating chains. Again I interrupted, pointing out that I had read the same Marxist texts as he and all those present had done, and that I had never been convinced by Marx's theory on nationalism. In fact, nothing that had been written or said on the subject by Marx, by Engels, by Lenin, by Stalin, by him or by any other Marxist had succeeded in changing my mind. All I saw in the burning of the Opera and the Jawhara Palace were acts of sabotage that were in total contradiction with any nationalistic feelings for this country.
Trained to contain such situations, L.K. smoothly changed tack, noting sadly that my class affiliations were responsible for my negative attitude and that, as Lenin had correctly pointed out, genuine commitment to the aims of the proletariat could only be found within the proletariat itself. But I too had been well trained for such discussions and was well versed in Marxist sophistry. You are absolutely right, I said, but then where does all this leave you? You yourself have admitted that your Havana cigars cost you sixty pounds a month, and that your almost daily breakfasts with M.S.A., son of a feudal pasha, cost you twice as much. Your home, which I have visited, is palatial. So while I do agree with everything you say, I would like to add that it disqualifies you from sitting in that chair preaching to comrades who have not been able to afford a decent meal since the last feast... Pandemonium broke out and bitter recriminations and personal insults were exchanged, but I had already detached myself from the meeting and taken my first step towards a higher ground from where I could clearly see my former comrades for what they really were. This was my first glimpse of the appalling intellectual darkness of Marxism, which was further revealed to me over the years of extensive reading and study.

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I wrote about guys like him a long time ago - 'The Journalist In The Hat'.

And what was interesting to me was this - that while I have (violently at times) disagreed with other bloggers in face to face discussions, I always had the feeling that there was a discussion going on, a dialog in which two people were engaged and trying to understand each other's points, if for no other reason than to better argue against them. But in dealing with The Journalist In The Hat, no such dialog took place. He had his point to make, and very little that I said (or, to be honest, that others who participated, including Howard Owens, who pointed out that he had worked as a journalist) was heard or responded to. He had his points, and he was going to make them over, and over, until we listened.

Or until we said 'bullshit' too many times and he walked away in a snit.

And I wrote about the core problem the Times faces

I think that newspapers - as a model for the kind of legacy information middleman that makes up the media industry - are badly wounded, but I doubt that they will die.

But they will go from the 93% of the market for written news - and more important for a certain class of advertising - that they once owned to, say 50 - 60%. And more, they will lose the ability to set prices for advertising in the market, which will make the business model for the newspaper much, much tougher.

As an institution, they are going to have to change, and change a lot. I'll pat myself on the back for a moment here; I was interviewed by Harry Chandler for a job in the fledgling "new media" division of the Times back in 1995 or 6. I did some homework, and as we sat and chatted, he asked me what the "new media" Times ought to look like; I told him that first of all, it was going to have to be much leaner. About 30% of the bottom-line revenues of the Times had come from classified ads, and those ads were about to go away, I told him. And world and national competitors were going to go after their readers - the Washington Post would compete on coverage of national politics, and the BBC on coverage in Europe. Their answer was to regionalize.

He didn't like either answer, and I didn't get the job.

I still think I was right...and the institutional rigidity and arrogance that the monopoly revenues bought them are what is keeping their OODA loop two miles wide today.

Hey Sean - looked at your circulation and advertising numbers lately? Do you think the kind of nonsense attitude on display might have anything to do with it? Or are you just a helpless victim of technology, like a whaleship captain?

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And the Sacramento Bee tells us:

The California Democratic Party has donated $250,000 to help Don Perata pay off his legal bills, as the Senate Democratic leader continues to rack up expenses fending off an ongoing FBI corruption investigation.

The party made the quarter-million dollar donation on July 1, according to campaign filings.

The money comes just in time for Perata, who, according to a May disclosure, had only $273 cash on hand in his legal defense fund and $250,000 in unpaid bills.

Jason Kinney, a spokesman for Perata on legal issues, said the donation -- and the continuing expenses -- are "no indication of anything."

"As long as this scurrilous and seemingly endless investigation continues to meander, Senator Perata will unfortunately continue to accrue significant legal expenses," Kinney said.

An Oakland-based federal grand jury launched the Perata investigation in 2004, probing the business dealings of Perata, his family and close friends. That year, FBI agents raided the homes of both Perata and his son, Nick. A year later, investigators subpoenaed Perata's Senate e-mails over a six-year period.

Well, he's gone soon...

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Recall that one of my great concerns (one shared by several of the Founders) is the stratification of American society. Our social compact only works when we all accept that we're all in this together, with the push and pull that comes when we realize that we really do sometimes have to "Join or Die" as the flag in the credits for 'John Adams' suggests.

You'll notice that social mobility in the US is declining, as families like ours (and richer families) manage to hand off the social capital of good upbringings and good education - as well as real capital - to our kids.

In today's society, there are really two arenas where there is significant mixing between the classes - public education and the military. One reason why I am so unwilling to give up on public education (even if some liberal friends don't like my hypothetical solutions) is that I think it vital that the children of the well-off get raised alongside the children of the rich and the children of the poor to then extent we can do so. Our sons benefited hugely from being raised in a public school system (an excellent one) that nonetheless contains a mixture of wealthy kids, upper-middle-class kids, plain middle-class kids and some blue-collar kids. By comparison, the kids of my friends who are getting 'better' education in private schools are - I believe - coming out worse for the experience.

My son who is in the Army is profiting, as well, from meeting and mingling with a bunch of different kinds of people.

The question is how, in a country as large as ours, we maintain some public space and maintain enough social equality to ensure that all have at least some measure of access to that space. In my mind, that's a legitimate concern for the state - because it is central to the state's self-preservation as a Republic.

I believe that preserving the Republic ought to be a project dear to conservatives as well as liberals, and that to do so liberals must sacrifice some of the equality that is their ideal, and conservatives some of the freedom from coercion.

I don't believe that by pushing people toward public school (without Draconian mandates), we're somehow 'enslaving' children. Note that this doesn't mean I'm completely happy with the quality of education, or that we don't need to fight to make the schools better. But I have no ideological barrier to public schools, and I share the value of enshrining them close to the heart of our communities.

I'd like to see this principle extended, and based on raising my own sons, think that taking a year or two between high school and college to do some kind of public service would be a good thing for most kids. Some might choose to join the military. Others would perform other kinds of community service. Those who needed it might attend two years of an academic boot camp, designed to make sure they could read and calculate effectively when they got out. We'd have a surplus of undertrained 18 year olds afoot, and we'd have to figure out things to do with them. Parks need supervision, community organizations need workers, much of it - like the WPA - will be make-work. But to a big extent, that might be a better thing than paying universities to babysit them.

Some kind of 'basic GI bill' provides educational benefits for those who have completed it, and some kind of extension of the VA provides some basic level of lifetime health care.

Should it be mandatory? Don't know there it gets tough. Would I give preferences to encourage people to do it? Clear preference at state junior and four-year colleges to those who'd done it? Absolutely. OK, discuss away. Me, I'm cooking tri-tip.

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The B & B was where TG and I stayed on our abbreviated honeymoon, and the owners remembered us - we'd ridden our motorcycles up and walked to all the wineries within three or four miles of there. When TG and I rode up, they remembered us - as well as the story of one of the other couples staying there who had coincidentally been heading to a concert at Disney Hall the afternoon we were married in the garden there, and had seen the end of our wedding.

What are the odds? It's a 3-room B & B...

We discovered Justin by driving randomly around the roads a few years ago on a trip we were taking in the car. Wine tasting is difficult on a bike, since we have an "eight hours bottle to throttle" rule we've borrowed from some of our pilot friends.

Justin makes great blended reds, and all of their wines are far more than well worth drinking...we wound up joining their club (we love wine clubs...great wine just shows up!). They have one of the most beautiful wineries on the Central Coast...here's the view from our table.

So dinner was beautiful and great food...hospitality warm and comfortable...and it feels like the angst of the last two weeks has been pretty well washed away.

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Specifically, I would say that liberals do a better job of recognizing that much as we may love America there's something arbitrary about it -- we're just so happen to be Americans whereas other people are Canadians or Mexicans or French or Russian or what have you. The conservative view is more like those Bill Simmons columns where not only is he extolling the virtues of this or that Boston sports team or moment, but he seems to genuinely not understand why other people don't see it that way. But of course Simmons is from Boston and others of us aren't.

All of which is to say the liberal doesn't, as a political matter, confuse the emotions of patriotism with a description of objective reality or anticipate that the citizens of Iraq or Russia or China or wherever will drop their own patriotisms and come to see things our way. Patriotism is a sentiment about your particular country but it's also a sentiment that's much more widespread than any particular country, and if you can't understand the full implications of that then you're going to go badly wrong.

No Matthew, you marvelous Harvard-trained Atlantic columnist you, you're describing something far closer to nationalism, not any kind of patriotism I would recognize - or that Schaar, Wolin, or a host of others I could name would recognize. They actually are different things, you know.

And here's a clue, which you spent several hundred thousand dollars to miss but which was available to you for two-fifty in library late charges.

There actually is something unique and well worth celebrating in American patriotism. First because we were among the first to throw off the yoke of hereditary privilege and substitute the rule of the governed. Second - and most important - because we are not a patrimony defined by land or by blood - not an accident of geography or a nation bound by a common heritage but instead a people animated by a set of ideas. That Yglesias thinks those ideas are worth as much as the ideas motivating - say, China's polity, or Iraq's - speaks volumes about what he sees when he looks around him.

And volumes about what I see when I look at him. I see someone who thinks love of country is not dissimilar to love of the Celtics. Why would anyone die for the Celtics? Why would anyone owe anything to the Celtics?

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Aristotle treats the problem of decisions that must be made without time for deliberation in the Nicomachean Ethics' section on the virtue of bravery. (That would be EN 1115a6-1117b22; the section quoted below is 1117a17-22, following Dr. Terence Irwin's translation.)

Indeed, that is why someone who is unafraid and unpeturbed in a sudden alarm seems braver than [someone who is unafraid only] in dangers that are obvious in advance; for what he does is more the result of his state of character, since it is less the outcome of preparation. If an action is forseen, we might decide to do it [not only because of our state of character, but] also by reason and rational calculation; but when we have no warning, [our decision to act] expresses our state of character.

For Aristotle, the aim of ethics is to train the soul to act rationally in accord with virtue. This is a long process, one that involves your upbringing as a youth, and then a period of training as an adult in practical virtue. If you reach adulthood without the proper upbringing, you cannot be trained unless you undergo a second upbringing that reforms your basic character to one that can learn practical virtue. The Marine Corps calls this second upbringing "Boot Camp," and it is for just that reason that they do it: they wish to teach young men and women to be professionals who will meet danger with just the kind of undeliberated courage that Aristotle wants to see in a virtuous man. They need first to make sure that your character is properly formed to receive the instruction and understand why it is important. What does that proper upbringing entail? Chiefly: teaching you what is beautiful.

Aristotle says plainly and repeatedly what it is that moral virtue is for the sake of, but the translators are afraid to give it to you straight. Most of them say it is the noble. One of them says it is the fine. If these answers went past you without even registering, that is probably because they make so little sense. To us, the word noble probably connotes some sort of high-minded naivetÈ, something hopelessly impractical. But Aristotle considers moral virtue the only practical road to effective action. The word fine is of the same sort but worse, suggesting some flimsy artistic soul who couldn't endure rough treatment, while Aristotle describes moral virtue as the most stable and durable condition in which we can meet all obstacles. The word the translators are afraid of is to kalon, the beautiful. Aristotle singles out as the distinguishing mark of courage, for example, that it is always "for the sake of the beautiful, for this is the end of virtue." (111 S b, 12-13) Of magnificence, or large-scale philanthropy, he says it is "for the sake of the beautiful, for this is common to the virtues." (1122 b, 78) What the person of good character loves with right desire and thinks of as an end with right reason must first be perceived as beautiful.

Emphasis added.

The Marine Corps, to continue with that example, puts you in a position in which you are -- as a professional fighting man is apt to be -- in a condition of hardship. They also then provide an exemplar, the Drill Instructor, who works even harder than you do. As exhausted as you may become, you cannot avoid admitting to yourself that they do more, longer, and with aplomb. The courage and professionalism of the DI is what is beautiful in hardship, and that is what you are taught to wish to become. Once you have learned that lesson, you are ready to begin the training in the Corps' values.

Successful military services do this more or less the same way, not only in America but throughout the world. They train recruits in a very precise notion of the nature of beauty: virtues of courage and honor, and of patriotism and devotion to the ideals of the nation, but also aesthetics such as the correct wearing of the uniform. This is as true for the Japanese Self Defense Forces as it is for the Black Watch. However, the modern military does not attempt to retrain its soldiers in every aspect of beauty or life. Much of the "first upbringing" is left alone.

For those who were never in the military, the first upbringing may be supplemented by a "second upbringing" in school, where a professor or some cultural figure is the exemplar of the beautiful. It may be that you have many such figures, one or more for each virtue that you decide is important to you.

The best people devote themselves to attempting to make real some part of that ideal beauty in their own lives. This is done through training and practice. Once you have performed the deliberation to know what is right in a given circumstance, you become virtuous by training your character so that you do that, and silence in your mind all arguments to the contrary. Eventually you should become the kind of person who can only do the right thing -- but it was freely chosen training and practice that got you there.

What Aristotle was saying in the initial quote was that we can best be sure that a man has is fully trained in a given virtue if he expresses it in sudden circumstances without time for deliberation. His character is fully formed, so that the deliberation and argument is no longer necessary: he just does what is right, without thought.

This is, for ethical decisions, precisely the condition that the martial arts aspires to teach in physical decisions. It is the condition the Japanese martial arts calls mushin, "No Mind." The Japanese concept is deeply informed by Zen Buddhism, which has a very different goal than Aristotelean ethics: but thoughts of such high concepts are not present in the moment.

When a man is swinging a stick at you and you are to reply with a stick of your own, the experience is that you make a proper reply without having to think about what a proper reply would be. "When a stone is tossed into clear water, the ripples spring forth by themselves." If your mind is like clear water, the simple fact of the attack creates the response, and so your stick goes where it should to block the attack -- and then to where it should to reply.

You get to this point only through very careful and diligent practice. "No mind" is exactly like Aristotle's state of virtue-without-deliberation. In both cases, you are seeing right now the expression of decisions made previously: first, a decision to accept a definition of beauty; and second, to train yourself constantly in pursuit of that beauty.

We may have very different concepts of what true beauty entails. The Zen concept of "no ego" does not, on the surface, look much like Aristotelean nobility of character: but they are both aesthetic concepts at last. Both are images of the most beautiful kind of life, and the most harmonious. Finally, the only real way to tell Aristotle's fully-trained virtuous man from one who has fully-trained himself to viciousness is that harmony with the greater world. Both the virtuous and vicious man acts without need for deliberation in the moment, but one is harmonious:

In addition, (B) there is a type of agent who refuses even to try to do what an ethically virtuous agent would do, because he has become convinced that justice, temperance, generosity and the like are of little or no value. Such people Aristotle calls evil (kakos, phaulos). He assumes that evil people are driven by desires for domination and luxury, and although they are single-minded in their pursuit of these goals, he portrays them as deeply divided, because their pleonexia—their desire for more and more—leaves them dissatisfied and full of self-hatred.

It should be noticed that all three of these deficiencies—continence, incontinence, vice—involve some lack of internal harmony. (Here Aristotle's debt to Plato is particularly evident, for one of the central ideas of the Republic is that the life of a good person is harmonious, and all other lives deviate to some degree from this ideal.)

Still, even allowing for that concept of harmony, there are noteworthy differences in the precise qualities of the aesthetics. Neither has exactly the view of any of the military services mentioned. There is a great deal of dissent on the question of precisely what beauty is. People make different choices, and the best people pursue them with constant practice, and therefore two virtuous people end up looking quite different from one another.

For example, consider this:

It should be obvious that the first arises from a vision of beauty offered by Hollywood Westerns: some combination of Roy Rogers and John Wayne, I would guess. (John Wayne did a great thing by continuing to play heroes as he got older, so that men could have a vision of how to age with honor. It is easy to present a vision of beauty while young, as much of the work is done for you by nature: but if you can still present a vision of beauty at sixty, it is only by what you have earned.) The second draws its vision of beauty from Japanese sources. Both men have devoted themselves to their individual visions, however, and have achieved a mastery that is beautiful to behold -- even if we do not agree precisely with their final vision.

That is clear evidence that free will does exist. Even if "the ten second problem" proves that a far greater number of decisions are decisions-without-time-to-deliberate, because they are made subconsciously, there is still a profound exercise of free will. We exercise free will in choosing a vision of beauty from what the world presents us. We exercise free will in training ourselves to accomplish it -- or, we exercise free will in not training, and accepting ourselves as less-beautiful than we might have been.

The fact that some decisions are made without conscious thought does not put that free will into question, even if it turns out that most decisions are made without conscious thought. We are still creatures of free will, because we choose the beautiful, and choose to train. It is that training that allows the best men to answer a challenge with what is ethically right, as it is that training that allows the best martial artists to answer an attack with what is physically right.

« ok, I'm done now